These once-great companies are bottoming out. The sharks are circling. The horrors of the next few months may make the last few months look like a golden age – except to savvy investors who try to wring the last few pieces of gold out of those downtrodden newspaper companies.

All of this talk incites Jeff Jarvis to say that he wouldn't "invest a dime in an old newspaper company, no matter how cheap".

Jarvis goes on to hint that the share price decline has continued for so long precisely because private equity investors are avoiding the sector. Far better, he suggests, to wait for "some of the giants [to] topple, leaving holes in the ground that'd be easier to fill from scratch".

Some believe that the predators are biding their time, waiting for the market to bottom out. Others believe that most of the big private equity groups have written off the newspaper industry.

Instead, they've been investing aggressively in B2B publishing, where the route out of structural decline seems more clearly signposted. (Not that the anonymous author of B2B Media would agree.)

Mention of this brings to mind a second constituency of doubters, who worry that private equity groups won't be able to raise enough cash.

This is speculative territory. At the FT, as elsewhere, hacks hold diverging views. At Alphaville, for example, Paul Murphy tends to think that private equity groups can still access the debt required to do big deals.

But only this morning, Ben Fenton and Martin Arnold are suggesting that a 506p private equity approach for Informa will fail. In the words of one anonymous source: "They are struggling to get it financed".

Does private equity intend to bid for newspaper assets? Can it raise the cash? As the waiting game continues, tempers are becomingfrayed in a bear market that's starting to show its true destructive potential.

Meirion Jones, Newsnight's former head of investigations, told Press Gazette in an interview - published this week - that he felt "everyone involved on the right side of the Savile argument has been forced out of the BBC".